Reinvestigating the Determinants of Environmental Degradation in Nigeria

Abstract

This study aims to reinvestigate the impact of economic growth in relation with trade openness, financial development, energy consumption and foreign direct investment to overcome the omitted variable problem on environmental degradation in Nigeria for the years from 1971 to 2015. Bounds test results reveal a cointegrating relationship between variables in the long run. Both in the long and short run, economic growth tends to affect CO2 emissions positively. In the long run, energy consumption positively impacts CO2 emissions while CO2 emissions tend to be negatively affected by foreign direct investment. Furthermore, a robust check was performed through the FMOLS and DOLS to establish the long run effect. Moreover, we employed wavelet coherence based causality test which provided stronger supportive evidence to the long-run estimations of this study. The significance of this study stems from the uniqueness that to the best of our knowledge there has been no study combining these variables in addition to the fact that the econometric techniques employed have not been applied in conjunction to the subject for the case of Nigeria.